Monday, February 4, 2013

A thought about Molinism

Ordinary subjunctive conditionals "were A to hold, B would hold" tell us about how B depends on A. But if that's what Molinist conditionals did, then they would undercut freedom on incompatibilist grounds. So Molinist conditionals aren't the same as ordinary subjunctive conditionals. But if they aren't the same, then it is difficult to see how they are introduced in a meaningful way. Moreover, the Molinist conditionals are treated as if they were ordinary for the purposes of divine decision theory. So this is a problem.

5 comments:

I fully agree. I have never liked the Molinist idea, since it seems to me that, if there is such a thing as "what I would definitely do given X" then I don't actually have free will. My decisions are more of a program or function of "if X then Y".

Interesting post. A couple thoughts: (i) It's widely held that not *all* subjunctive conditionals tell us how the consequent depends on the antecedent-- e.g. "backtracking" conditionals: "I didn't take the MCAT last month. But if I had, I would have studied for it in advance." Also, subjunctive conditionals of the form "If it were the case that A, it would have been the case that A" seem to be true, yet do not entail the relevant kind of dependence (assuming that irreflexivity holds of the kind of dependence in question). (ii) Incompatibilism is consistent with holding that my actions' depend on the immediately prior state of the world, so long as the dependence in question is weaker than full-on "deterministic" dependence.

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